A slow start for smart homes

July 19, 2012|Mary Umberger | On Real Estate

A state-of-the-art energy monitoring system at the Smart Home exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)

There's something about the notion of a house of the future that feeds the imagination. Maybe it's because we love the fantasy of having our own Rosie the Robot to run our houses the way she did for the space-age Jetson cartoon family.

You would think we're getting closer to the everyday availability of a truly Internet-enabled house to manage our consumption of electricity, water, food and other resources, making our lives easier and more economical.

Then again, maybe not. The Pew Internet & American Life Project, in collaboration with Elon University in North Carolina, recently asked more than 1,000 movers and shakers in technology how likely we are to see the routine implementation of smart systems in our homes by 2020.

About half of the respondents said, yes, this home is almost within our grasp. But the other half said, sorry, no, it's too complicated, too expensive, and people don't understand it or even want it, and Rosie isn't likely coming to your house anytime soon, said Lee Rainie, director of the project for Pew.

Q: You wanted to know how close we are to a truly smart home, not a prototype or an experiment but an everyday thing. Who did you ask?

A: We compiled a list of experts in a variety of ways. We did a serious canvassing of people who had things to say about the Internet between 1990 and 1995 (when it was on the rise), and we added obvious people to the list, people who get quoted a lot and who are treated like rock stars at conferences. Then we asked these people for their own recommendations. We got a mix of 1,021 people who work in technology and study it, as scholars and as practitioners.

We posed to them two opposing scenarios: One suggested that by 2020, the connected household will have become a model of efficiency, making the house of the future nearly a reality. The other scenario held that by 2020 most initiatives to imbed Internet-enabled devices in the home will have failed because of various obstacles; that the home of 2020 would (function) about the same as the home of 2011.

So we got a split verdict. About half agreed with the first scenario, half with the second. And we allowed them to comment about why they held a particular opinion.

Q: Your report on this survey tends to dwell on the half that said, sorry, no Jetsons home is coming soon. What were their reasons?

A: A lot of people said, from a technology standpoint as well as an industry standpoint, that there are barriers to this stuff. It's hard to make these (companies and systems) work together, hard to make people adopt it, hard to make the case that they're money savers or productivity enhancers. Many said that it's a big, complicated task that doesn't seem to want to happen before 2020.

Q: It seems straightforward to presume that it's difficult to integrate the systems and deliver service on a broad basis. But didn't your respondents also think Americans just aren't ready for the home of the future?

A: Yes. One reason that often was cited is that consumers are concerned about (how these services might affect) their privacy. There's clearly more concern in the general public about privacy these days. People are newly sensitized in the mobile era to what our gadgets know about us and are disclosing about us.

Then there's the matter of complexity. Some people just like the stuff they've got and don't want to upgrade. People hear about this fabulous dashboard of the future (to manage our homes), and in theory it sounds awesome. But when they finally kick the tires and get the price tag, people say, well, I guess I can live without it.

Q: Doesn't it also make a difference that in the aftermath of the housing bubble, there just aren't many houses being built, period?

A: A bunch of answers reflected that. Whatever progress was being made got dented in 2008 with the collapse of the housing market. And the success (of implementing these smart systems) depends largely on new housing stock. The systems don't lend themselves very well to retrofitting.

Q: What did the optimists say about a 2020 home of the future?

A: Many said that the value (of smart homes) would be self-evident, that there'd be a financial benefit as well as a personal comfort benefit, and that it would start to cascade as soon as the early adopters picked it up and started talking it up.

Some of them also said they hoped that the tax codes and zoning codes would help nudge designers and builders into these frameworks. They know that the technology exists, but people need to be enticed into it, and a driver of this would be incentives in public policy as well as what's happening in the marketplace.